Watching a ballet company in an out of town matinee will never guarantee you the starriest casts - but it may draw attention to less obvious talents, such as English National Ballet's Yat Sen Chang. Chang is a shortish, stockyish dancer who's more likely to be cast in character solos than romantic leads. But as Solor in Wednesday's performance of Marius Petipa's Kingdom of the Shades at the Apollo Theatre, Oxford, he took appealing charge of the stage.

The exquisite, unsullied patterns of this work (which actually forms Act III of La Bayadère) are notoriously exposing for its dancers, yet some careful training carried the corps through their first terrifyingly sustained entrance, and only a few grim-faced wobbles marred the famously dreamy succession of arabesques. It was unfortunate that, in their succeeding numbers, many of the corps looked so subdued - but maybe they were taking their lead from Monica Perego, whose Nikiya appeared peculiarly bad-tempered throughout.

It was left to Chang, the only man on a stage full of women, to kindle our enthusiasm, and he did his best, partnering Perego with a sweet-tempered gallantry which outshone his less than classically pure line, and using his athletic jump to draw an airy line of dance that lifted and turned within the music.

In a revival of Glen Tetley's 1977 ballet Sphinx, Chang again gave a highly personal, highly charged performance. Tetley's hard-edged, high-gloss choreography portrays a mixed-myth love triangle in which the Sphinx falls under the spell of Oedipus's mortal attractions, watched disapprovingly by the Egyptian god Anubis. Chang, as the latter, danced with a feral muscularity that effected a startling transformation into animal god. When he bared his throat in a brutal jackal laugh, the wildness of it made your skin prickle. Tamara Rojo was also an unusually engaging Sphinx, finding a vulnerable tenderness at the heart of the role, despite some shaky partnering by a handsome but inexperienced-looking Altin Kaftira.

Closing the programme was Kenneth MacMillan's 1962 The Rite of Spring, revived with new designs by Yolande Sonnabend. This work hasn't been seen on the British stage for years, and it's enterprising of English National Ballet to bring back what some consider a classic. I have to admit, however, that I'm not among those who do. MacMillan may have risen to the challenge created by his huge cast (more than 40 dancers) to create some extraordinarily arresting patterns - bodies clustered into knots of seething energy or stacked in long jagged lines - but his attempts at creating an elemental language have always seemed to me clownish and lightweight.

The dancers' lolling heads, sagging knees and splayed hands never communicated the urgency of a life and death ritual. ENB's men tried to inject some ferocity into their dancing but the women mostly looked flighty. And even a matinee shouldn't feature Joanne Clarke as the Chosen One, helplessly under-powered as she is both in her dancing and dramatic imagination. In the event, what should have been a bold conclusion to an interestingly varied programme turned out to be a disappointing whimper.